sarah otm, i think that's true. maybe people still like to pretend that the U.S. is a "classless" society, but this is just BS.

i've maybe talked about this before, but there was recently a three-day "hempfest" drug celebration in a public park near my neighborhood. drew tens of thousands of weed enthusiasts. and for days a rode/walked around in a state of horrifed revulsion at the weedian dregs. i fucking loathed them and their dreadlocks and their tye dye and their ICP pants and their hoodies. they seemed to me like the worst people imaginable, and i couldn't imagine why any supposedly legit political rally (hempfest posits itself as political activism) could hope to succeed by associating itself with such.

but i'm middle class, from an upper class background. and my resolutely working class girlfriend was much less horrified. (she gets horrifed by hipsters in williamsburg, but that's another story.) which made me wonder if my revulsion wasn't a legit reaction to stupid burnouts, but rather simple revulsion at the culture of a different class. so yeah, class in america.

xp - power and money are stronger determinants of future status, opportunities, etc. But there are so many ilx threads that are America-centric that are about things that are basically class signifiers and the issues people have with them or affiliate with them - it definitely has an effect, though undoubtedly nowhere near the way it does in the UK

yes - pretty much - "Touch of Class" was the name of a company in Vegas that operated a fleet of them, that when i saw one, i shook my head and laughed, because those things are so ostentatiously a sign of failing at being classy.

class is culture as much as money. my mom's parents were east coast society snobs from way back, and so my mom was too, though she was just a schoolteacher and married badly. and so i am too, in a distant way, though i have always lived at the edge of poverty. similarly, lots of people attain wealth quickly but remain chavish, rent SUV stretch limos, purchase awful sprawling homes with no character, laugh too loudly at the wrong things and wear bad sandals.

i guess i just feel like perceptions of class as culture are part of what contribute to Americans not actually being aware of how class affects their lives. i'm not saying people think of class as about money here; i guess i'm saying that they should.

see, i feel like a lot of Americans do perceive class = money and dance around the cultural signifiers which are a relation to class and the values of various classes. Education is a big one. Consumer goods is another.

well yeah - but i see the problem with that as Palin and Bush politically fuck over "regular people" - like if they had politics that actually benefited working people, their public images wouldn't be as nauseating

I've been told by multiple people, including some who know me very well (girlfriend who tried to downplay my class background in conversation) that I don't "seem working class." Which pisses me off on two levels - I take a lot of pride in my background, and I'm offended at the idea that listening to weird music or appearing to be intelligent in some way is a signifier that I didn't grow up helping my dad and grandfather out putting on roofs when I was 10 or that I don't have an irrational fear of money because I remember my parents scrambling for rent almost every month in elementary school.

see, i feel like a lot of Americans do perceive class = money and dance around the cultural signifiers which are a relation to class and the values of various classes. Education is a big one. Consumer goods is another.

― sarahel, Friday, September 3, 2010 3:51 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, kind of...

i guess i'd put it like this: people in the US tend to kneejerk assume their political enemies are of a different class than themselves, either much richer, or poorer, or some unholy alliance of the two

this only really a percetpional battle within the median income bands, where political opinion is really up for grabs. you have to look at region, occupation and education to get a bead on who they vote for/what they believe, drilling down further than just yearly income.

however, the number of liberal billionaires is really small, no matter how much right wingers hate them. and the number of arch-conservative poor people is also small, no matter how much liberals are terrified of them.

but sarahel, whatever people's attitudes about money some people measurably have more than others!!!

yeah, but that's self-evident and doesn't require further elaboration. what sarah's saying is not so obvious and opens up on some interesting subtleties. even if they carry less weight than the base-level money stuff.

what exactly do you mean by "arch-conservative" here, because I feel like you are glossing over a large invisible-to-white-America cross-section of the American minority experience that can't be summed up by "votes Republican"

contenderizer i think you have it exactly backwards -- the cultural baggage of what we mean when we say e.g. "working class" is all very upfront, while the raw dollar values that underly all these things are occluded and take some digging to see clearly.

...and that, i think, its what's going on in the song, like i argued upthread. the girl wants to play around with a culture that looks free and fun, and the guy is trying to get her to see that it's the (materially) constrained nature of that life that makes it what it is.

and how much someone gets paid for their labor is only so determinant. How dependent is that person on a particular company, or industry, and what are their working conditions? Like, city bus drivers make pretty good money. But they have to drive a bus, and wear crappy polyester uniforms, and take shit from customers, and let's say they get tired of being a bus driver, what else are they qualified to do? Compare that to a community college professor (who makes about the same amount) - the professor gets an office, gets to more or less wear what they want, they get to be treated with dignity and respect, etc.

let's take milo's example of being worried about money. This seems to be something that is common to people who grew up working class - whereas someone who grew up middle class or higher (barring traumatic event to the family where they had serious problems), has less of a panic about it, because they're used to being comfortable.